This isn't one of those movies obvious enough to claim a nod on every "scariest ever" list, but it really should be. If you haven't seen it, here's how it goes:

Amelia lives alone with her seven-year-old son, Sam, who was born on the worst day of her life. Her husband was killed in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to give birth.

Yeah, that'll give you issues.

What little remains of her social support system is falling apart, between her sister and friends' waning patience with her failure to get over the loss of her husband, and her son's acting out making him unwelcome among their children.

One night, Sam asks Amelia to read him a bedtime story off his shelf that she doesn't remember acquiring.

This doesn't even come close to being the creepiest thing about it.

It's a pop-up book about a boogeyman-esque figure called the Babadook, which will torment anyone who knows of its existence. Its ominous catchphrase? "You can't get rid of the Babadook."

Once it's been presumably summoned from the book, the Babadook's presence begins invading Amelia and Sam’s lives and stretching Amelia's sanity.

Why it's terrifying:

The few moments in which the Babadook makes actual appearances are quite frightening, in a basic anticipation and jumpscare sort of way,

But these are not the moments the movie is about. The real horror is in what it does to the relationship between Amelia and Sam.

It's about all the little accumulating incidents, like the particularly simple and disturbing scene in which the two of them sit down to a simple at-home dinner and find glass in Amelia's bowl of soup, only in her bowl, to which Sam exclaims, "The Babadook did it!"

Through most of the ride, it's unclear if the Babadook is real and tormenting both of them, or if Sam is possessed by the Babadook, or if Sam is simply evil and making up the Babadook as an alibi, or if Amelia is losing her mind, and the Babadook goings-on are projections of her resentment for her son and her rationalizations for being an increasingly awful mother.

The lack of a clear target for all the unease removes any possible pockets of comfort that could otherwise exist in a magical monster stalker story, creating a thoroughly non-literal but incredibly powerful sense of claustrophobia.

This isn't the claustrophobia of being inside a small, locked room, or in a remote vacation locale with openness on every side but no means of transportation away. Physically, there's nothing to stop Amelia from getting up, walking out of the house, getting in her car, and driving.

It just wouldn't make anything better. It wouldn't change the fact that her husband is dead, all the adults she knows are sick of her, and she's responsible for a seven-year-old kid she can't seem to get along with.

This movie isn't really about fears of things that are supernatural and impossible.

Nor is it about fear of something that "could totally happen" but comfortingly probably won't, at least to most people.

The Babadook is the slightest supernatural embellishment of the claustrophobia of being trapped inside a life. It's the claustrophobia of being trapped in a situation that requires you to be stronger than you are. And that is something that, to some degree, will happen to everyone.

As horror geeks, Matt and I often joke about how, when we get around adding our own brood of mini-freaks to the world, they're going to scare us silly, what with their inevitable monster-infested closets, imaginary friends, uncanny-looking dolls and whatnot. It's probably true, but it's also something we can joke about.

All laughs aside, even with its optimistic ending involving Amelia and Sam overpowering the Babadook with their long-buried love for each other and getting around the "you can't get rid of the Babadook" rule by locking it in their basement and feeding it worms from their garden, this movie scares the frakking expletive out of me.

I may not be able to relate to it in quite the way certain friends who already have kids (and who also agree on its scare factor) can, but I don't need my own mini-freaks to recognize this as perhaps the only story I know that takes a parent character this far away from the realms of angelic guardian, irredeemable monster, adorably well-meaning fool, or nonentity.

It's the most serious acknowledgement I've seen of the fact that taking care of a tiny human is such an enormous responsibility that it wouldn’t take a cartoonish level of mustache-twirling evil to make some serious screw ups. It would take an instant of cracking under tremendous pressure.

Okay, for this week's installment of movies that have sincerely freaked me out, we're back on the horror shelf with a classic that many of you may recognize as one of the stronger influences on The Prospero Chronicles.

(The first two books of which are, incidentally, presently on sale on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and all other ebook platforms, for the seasonally celebratory sum of $1.99 each, for the whole month of October. We now return you to your regularly scheduled list article.)

If you haven't seen the ‘70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, here's how it goes:

After a strange botanical specimen falls from the sky in San Francisco, some of the residents begin behaving oddly, so oddly that a few of their loved ones, including one of our heroes, Elizabeth, go so far as to conclude that the victims, who include Elizabeth’s boyfriend, are no longer themselves at all.

This hypothesis goes over about as well as you'd expect with most people who hear it at first, but as more and more of their friends and neighbors become undeniably affected, our small band of survivors starts to dig, until they discover the alien plant spores growing into replicas of the hapless humans they infect.

Then it's a race to find a way to stop the spread of the “pod people” before our characters, and the rest of the humans of their world, are picked off one by one.

Why it's terrifying:

This one's all about paranoia, in different phases and from different angles. It's a pretty long one for a horror movie, nearly two hours, and that's because everything frightening about this whole scenario gets its own act.

We start out with Elizabeth fearing for her sanity for thinking that something like this could happen, and fearing not being believed if it is. When she goes to one of her friends, Matthew, for advice, he tries to talk her into discussing it casually with a psychiatrist he knows, guessing, based on what’s going on in her life at the time, that she might subconsciously want to believe her boyfriend has been replaced by something inhuman.

This isn't the typical horror movie scene in which one or more characters remain willfully ignorant of the ensuing horrors in spite of the evidence, or refuse to look at the evidence altogether, simply because it stretches their comfort zone of comprehension. It's not a case of the first character to be terrorized failing to communicate vital details. There is no evidence to share at this point. No solid details to communicate. Elizabeth isn't even sure of what's going on herself. She just has a feeling, so Matthew tells her she's overthinking things and has nothing to worry about, as any good friend would. That’s what makes the scene effectively creepy, how perfectly reasonable it is given what’s known at the time.

Even better, once the evidence does build up, the characters deal with it about as rationally as can be expected and start guarding each other in shifts to avoid being replaced.

The question changes from "Who's going to believe me?" to "Who's going to help us?" And that's just as scary, because not only is pod person evidence tricky to hold onto, the pod people are a step ahead of this ad hoc investigation, focusing their replacements on police and anyone in a position to corroborate our heroes' stories.

Finally, the power shifts to such a degree that this is no longer a story about aliens hiding among humans. It's about the few remaining humans trying to hide among the aliens, who are determined to weed them out. The aliens' imitation of human behavior is imperfect, but the only way to avoid being overpowered and replaced is to imitate the aliens' imitation of human behavior, making it nearly impossible for the humans to signal their humanity to each other.

All things that look like people are assumed alien. Even members of our resistance group of heroes who are separated for any length of time are safer to assume alien than not.

The remaining humans soon realize that the greatest threat to their survival will be their need for company, if every time they're split up the safest thing to do is stay split, begging the question of whether the chance to stay human is worth sacrificing a fundamental element of their humanity.

I did mention that this was a major inspiration for The Prospero Chronicles, right?

Okay, now for the scarring part.

All this is scary enough, at least it is in this movie where the characters are likeable and distinguishable enough for us to mourn their separation and the erasure of their humanity, unlike other similar stories that seem to think the concept alone is enough.

Sorry. I still can’t love the 1982 The Thing.

But Invasion of the Body Snatchers also tops things off with an extra special nightmare fuel image. I've written about it before, but this time I'll try to do the spoiler-free version, because if you're looking for scares this Halloween and haven't seen this one, I'm hoping you'll decide to check it out.

Once the pod people have a secure stranglehold on the world, enough that it's not them but the humans who have to hide, they begin pointing out any humans they notice to each other by pointing and making quite possibly the most horrifying sound ever concocted.

It's animal-like and unearthly. It's nails-on-a-chalkboard teeth grinding, but worse than what how it sounds is what it means.

It's the cop siren behind you on the freeway. It's the teacher saying your name when you weren't paying attention. It's the alarm you forgot you set for the appointment you didn't want to remember, only the appointment is for being erased, absorbed and impersonated forever after by an alien being.

And it means the person pointing and screeching at you has already had that happen to them, in case you were hoping otherwise.

It's the “you're busted, you screwed up, and you can't fix it now” sound, and it will stand my hair on end every time.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

I originally planned for this list to be all straight horror, but it didn't take much time sorting through the movies that have sincerely messed me up to realize there are only so many R-rated movies that can honestly contend with the warping factor to be found in the kids' section.

If you haven't had the chance to suffer from Return to Oz nightmares, either as a child or an adult, here's how it goes:

After making her wish on the ruby slippers to get home from Oz, Dorothy returns to a tornado-shattered house and a family that thinks, due to her Oz-related ramblings, that she's lost her mind.

She gets sent to an eighteen-nineties mental hospital to be cured of her delusions and nightmares and spends the night tied to a dolly and hooked up to an early electrotherapy machine, during a thunderstorm, until she's rescued by Oz's princess, Ozma.

Ozma and Dorothy are separated, but Dorothy is able to escape from the institute and back to Oz via a flash flood that almost drowns her.

And then we're out of cuckoo's nest territory, and she's back in a fantasy world of magical wonders where everything is better, right?

Does anyone remember all the flying monkey nightmares from the first trip to Oz? Well, now it's a few million times worse.

Dorothy wakes up at the edge of Oz, stranded a few yards into the Deadly Desert, which sounds like some corny alliterative hyperbole, until she explains that anything living that touches this wasteland that surrounds Oz instantly turns to sand.

This leads to a high-stakes game of "The Floor is Made of Lava," in which Dorothy manages to leap across the rocks to the lush green safety of Oz proper, where she has approximately two minutes to savor her victory and recover her strength before discovering ruins of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City and the petrified remains of all her friends.

Her despair is also cut short by easily the most horrifying creatures in all of the Oz movie universes, the Wheelers,

...Who tell her she's an outlaw in the eyes of Oz's new overlord, the Gnome King, and chase her around the Emerald City ruins until they corner her in a stone room where she locks herself in, and taunt her through the keyhole about how when she comes out they're going to rip her into little pieces and throw the pieces back in the Deadly Desert.

Of course, Dorothy makes a new friend in that room who helps her get past the Wheelers to embark on an adventure to save all her old friends and put Oz to rights, but the worst is yet to come.

Why it's terrifying:

Other than all of the above?

Okay, a lot of this is the childhood thing. Plenty of adult horror revolves around corruption of childhood imagery.

And for good reason. Adults tend to think of childhood as a sacred and paradoxically vulnerable safe space, so violating it is one of the surest ways to get a visceral reaction. Return to Oz (perhaps inadvertently) takes this a step further by making it personal instead of general, targeting the specific childhood icons that make up the happy parts of Oz, and catching as much of the audience as possible before they're prepared and used to this whole corruption of innocence storytelling tactic.

If it didn't catch you that early, or if you never had a fuzzy childhood attachment to the Scarecrow and Tin Man and Cowardly Lion, don't worry, there's plenty here to traumatize fresh-eyed adults.

Rather than just preying on nostalgia, Return to Oz also uses the inherent terror of childhood helplessness. This is definitely one of my personal buttons, no denying, but I don't care how good or bad or recent or long ago your childhood was; I doubt there's anyone who can't relate to that at least a little.

Like the original Wizard of Oz, Return to Oz is played as maybe-or-maybe-not a dream. Dorothy gets to Oz while unconscious, under traumatic circumstances, wakes up later in the real world with a logical explanation available for the time in between, and various objects and themes from her life carry into her Oz experience, with the characters who frighten her in and out of Oz played by the same actors.

In the real world, in the mental hospital, Dorothy's in about as helpless a situation as possible. She's physically restrained, under the care of adult strangers, and no one believes or listens to a word she says.

In Oz, a witch who resembles the hospital nurse/warden, who tied Dorothy to the dolly and confiscated her lunch from home, instead throws her in a tower, intending to age her to her prime and then cut off her head to wear as part of her rotating collection.

Because who’s going to stop her?

And the Gnome King, who resembles the doctor who made a token attempt to set Dorothy at ease by introducing her to his machines while making it subtly clear that she had no choice whatsoever in the matter of her treatment, welcomes her cordially to his palace and offers her what he claims is a sporting chance to win her friends back… and then cheats when it seems she might succeed at his ridiculously difficult guessing game, which comes with a penalty of being turned into a conscious but completely inanimate object for all eternity.

Because what recourse could a little girl possibly have if that's what he wants to do?

The Wheelers don’t connect directly to anything in Dorothy’s real world, but I still find them one of the scariest manifestations of that helplessness.

There are all sorts of being-chased-by-something scenes in and out of the horror genre with varying levels of effectiveness, but what always got me about the Wheelers was the way they're so much bigger, stronger and faster than Dorothy, they outnumber her, and they're just human enough to communicate what they'll do if they catch her and that they're doing it purely for fun, but too pack animal-like to be reasoned with.

Translation: These guys are the fear of bullies, amplified to a magical nightmare degree.

Those are the fears that I'm certain Return to Oz got right a hundred percent intentionally, and regardless of the shelf it's found on, I have to pay respect.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

For this year’s countdown on this greatest of all months, I figured it’s about time for me to weigh in on that particularly contentious horror geek topic, the scariest movies of all time.

You’ll notice this is not a “Fi’s Five Favorites” list. That’s because these are not my five favorite horror movies, nor my five favorite cross-genre movies with some kind of scare factor to them. These are the five movies that have given me the flat-out most intense case of the jeebies, which, oddly enough, isn’t even close to being the same list.

Of course, that distinction changes nothing about the credit these movies deserve for their insane jeebies-inducing-ness.

First up, Sinister.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s how it goes:

Ellison is a down-on-his-luck true crime writer looking for his next hit.

He moves with his family to a house where the previous family was mysteriously murdered, to research and write about the crime, and discovers a box of film strips in the attic, showing a set of similar murders of whole families, which he begins to piece together as a chain reaction orchestrated by an ancient demon called Bughuul, with his own family now next in line.

Why it’s terrifying:

On paper, this is a pretty basic evil house story, so it takes doing a lot of things extremely right to put it on this list. First, the obvious personal stuff.

Screenwriters never represent book writers accurately, and there are a few details that are a little off even in Sinister. For example, the size of the house this family can afford while wondering where their next paycheck is coming from, even accounting for the standard murder house discount. But then, movie makers pull that one on protagonists of every career.

The obsession that goes with writing, on the other hand, and the terrors of failure, of being selfish, of being a fraud, of not being understood, of being asked to choose between what and whom you love, those this movie gets spot-on, making Ellison’s fate extra scary in a very different way for me, for obvious reasons.

Okay, on to the non-writer creep factors, which are quite sufficient on their own.

The big moments are the murder films, which are not startling. They’re not about their supernatural elements. They’re not cartoonishly in-your-face bloody like the setpieces of most movies that revolve around their creative kills, nor are they cut-away-to-black restrained. They’re just plain thoroughly, straightforwardly disturbing.

Maybe it’s the silence of the films. No screams, no dialogue. Maybe it’s the stalker-shots at the beginnings of the films before they get to the murdering, taken from behind bushes. Maybe it’s the way the victims are sedated first, or the direct, un-gloating, unfeeling action of the offscreen killer.

The result is that with no overacting, underacting, imperfect visual effects, and no looking away from the scene itself in order to avoid these things, there’s about as little as there can be in the way of comforting reminders that this is a movie.

We get no more or less than exactly what low quality soundless recordings of things like four semi-conscious people tied to weighted deck chairs being drowned in a swimming pool would look like.

It’s a simple, perfectly effective communication of the horror of the subject, and just recounting it here is giving me the chills all over.

Okay, true horribleness aside, there’s one more extra special touch that puts Sinister over the top for me.

Evil house stories usually come tumbling down over the obvious question: Why not leave?

Before something like this happens.

Sinister plays with this in one very creepy, slightly spoiler-y way:

It’s moving out of the house that kills you.

Oh, the torment begins the moment the family moves into the evil house, and it’s a hundred percent effective in forcing them to run screaming from their massive suburban investment. And that’s when the obsolete shaky-cam stalker footage starts.

I love when any story can successfully spin a tired trope a new way, so this would feed my love of this movie without having to feed my fear of it, but it manages to do both by making the sense of doom that much stronger.

Knowing that characters probably won’t escape from an evil house but can at least spend a couple hours trying like hell can be scary.

Knowing they've already made an unrecoverable error but still have to pull the trigger to resolve the rest of the curse, that's doom. And for me at least, that's infinitely more terrifying.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!